PLUGGING YOUR EARS TO FIREWORKS

I.

The thing I hate about summer is it's so in your face. I caught polio then. Blonde I had a temper, not like my cousin Nyrene a capelli rosso, a brilliant redhead.

I got sick over the Fourth of July. Taken out on my cousin's boat, too ill to finish my lemonade which mother finished. By the time fireworks were exploding in the sky over Manhattan, I was sleeping next to an iron lung in isolation in New York's big metropolitan hospital. I had always plugged my ears to fireworks. Fancy that! A musical child, I was riled by sound. But now, I was beyond it all having had the lumbar puncture, spinal tap which told the pediatrician I had polio. "My first polio!" he exclaimed outside the small lab in New Rochelle's dollhouse hospital. Our mother heard.

"You are the first child who had a spinal tap and didn't cry," the technician told me. How could I? I had spent all my tears the night before when mother said I would wake the neighbors with my raving." That was when the virus was literally stripping by burning the myelin sheath form my spinal cord. I think of burst mattress buttons down South and having to smile when you want to cry. Fancy is not my name. Don't Forget to keep cool. It's a grotesque inversion of Brueghel's "Children's Games," in scorching Hellish heat.

On the bright side, my little Waterford Crystal clock from mother twirls as though wearing crystal pinafores and reflects in the bureau as though the cabinet a tree was killed for were a mirror.

Fancy, if anyone calls you colorless I'll clobber them. We have lots of lonesome prairie songs like that written by Hank Snow. I've gone and bought you a red and white sweater with Canada's colors on it for Canada day but it has a lighthouse..

"Florida," I thought, 'You want to turn yourself around. The dreams keep coming."

"Substance abuse," you cried, 'That's what this year was all about." Now I am in my ebon old age and what infuriates me is that when we cross the little theme park you seem to want to control me. Control never works. Yet last night, before bed you had, you told me, pink lemonade and a peanut butter sandwich proving you ineradicably a child.

. . .I dance on whirling, until it becomes the fourth of July which I observed from my hospital bed. only a swatch of blue sky. Now I do the Foxtrot. I dance in my Waterford like a translucent jellyfish. Next thing come fireowrks. I plug both ears while Fancy stands out on the terrace in ecstasy. I want to tell Fancy about needing to dress up to please one's love after thirty years but she just stands out there in her undershirt listening to firecrackers: the wheels, the fizzles, the waterfalls. I'm the eternal feminine: gloves, pale lip gloss, shadow on my green eyes. I can't complain. Think of the transgendered child. I begin to slice potato into my morning cereal thinking it a banana. Just think, one day we will not be here. Other souls will be breathing in other frames.

I look out on a flawless morning These are the precious morning hours which soon flatten, wane into afternoon, then rise again in evening. They're like Christ that way.

Our daddy drank himself silly when I got paralyzed> Cousin Nyrene wept, a capelli rosso. It was then realized I had a sensitivity and dimension he had not imagined when he re-made my acquaintance at age twenty-one. Now I am unstoppable, at the edge of storm, riding a rollercoaster, both arms wide as a phantom jet, a wildbird, fancy here I come!

II.

I have not been able to walk since the summer I was twelve years old.

The little boys are not here. They dream, eat, sleep it, the four bases of a baseball diamond. They come skidding into dawn toting the homebase fatter them skinning their elbows, debriding their knees of dirt until they bleed into the dust they have won in a spectacular otherworldly home-run. They are growing baseball wings. Diaphanous, wings droop behind the young males as they ascend the stairs. Wings make for that extra infinitesimal weight when the boys themselves under the covers at night. Once they dream, and then alone can each wing begin slowly to stretch, unpleat like a fan, and fully open.

****

The indigos of youth have become molten, flowing into the metals of age. The cyclamens of mid-life are no longer copper-tipped, rather silver. "The edge is what I have." Beware the brown: I remember mother's brown satin wedding dress. I live where the people Canadian life like land mirrored in water, the people reflective, reflecting. Life came to me in one body of experience when young. I rode the rail. I took the day in my hands "Look," a woman said this morning" They must be twins: their legs are the same length.' Whereas I found days of different lengths in youth and mid age in the burnished years. I find them long of the same length like twins. As though I were twinned: the windows are lit, but low-lit. I miss Indigo and Cyclamen. It reminds of moving form Iowa City to Des Moines: singing peripheral psalms. Only 150 miles apart but a world between: a marriage, a job changed.

I sit here in the room, a woman two years shy of seventy, but shy of nothing else. A bud vase holds one long-stemmed rose which has lasted so long its petals are outlined with iron.

Ebony flow the street lamps, the cabinet tops, all and everything illumination. All blackness alive and shining. We are foundlings. In a foundry. It hurts to lose what one has once had: walking, youth, beauty, In f lash, it is gone. While we were not looking, great age has come and the boys are not here: they are coming into home plate dragging the base after them in the dust, the air rising before them an oblique, cathedral slant of diamond.

Lynn Strongin Lynn Strongin (b. NYC 1939) grew up in and around New York and in certain parts of the rural South which made a deep impression on her. Parents of Eastern European Jewish ancestors raised her in a rich artistic environment. Her memoir Indigo is based largely on these two locales. Chapters of Indigo have appeared in various venues such as StorySouth, Atlantic /3711, Verb Sap, The Square Table, Riverbabble and in Italy’s Storie. “Audubon Wallpaper,” a chapter which came out first in StorySouth was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She will have twelve books out by mid-2006, among them the anthology The Sorrow Psalms;A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy to be published by the University of Iowa Press, June 2006. Her work appears in over thirty anthologies, seventy journals. In the Sixties, she worked for poet Denise Levertov in the political environment of Berkeley. Most recently her prose has appeared in The Dublin Review. For the past twenty-five years she has made Victoria, British Columbia her home.

Lynn's book of short stories, Spin the Bottle: Kiss Me A Jewish child in the South has been accepted for publication by Plain View Press, Austin.

Email: Lynn Strongin

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